These two pacific nations hold the highest obesity rates in the world

Childhood obesity continues to rise around the world, proving thru numbers and even validated by the World Health Organization or WHO.

In fact, the World Health Organization has called it “one of the most serious public health challenges of the 21st century.”

“Yet the prevalence of childhood obesity appears to vary across countries. Island nations in the Pacific, such as Nauru and the Cook Islands, appear to have the highest obesity rates among children 5 to 19.

However, the countries like Ethiopia and Burkina Faso appear to have the lowest rates, citing the data from Parenting Without Borders.

Parenting Without Borders considers how parenting trends and methods differ — or don’t — around the world.

“There are still more children that are underweight in the world than there are obese, but that’s likely to change pretty soon,” said Tiago Barreira, an assistant professor in the Department of Exercise Science at Syracuse University in New York.

The prevalence of child and adolescent obesity is expected to surpass the prevalence of moderate and severe underweight by 2022, according to a study published in the journal The Lancet in 2017.

The study estimated that in 1975, there were 11 million children 5 to 19 with obesity, and that number increased to 124 million in 2016.

The number of obese or overweight children 5 and younger climbed from 32 million globally in 1990 to 41 million in 2016, according to WHO data.